When the Labatt Brewing Company threatened legal action against the Montreal Gazette last week if it did not take down a photograph from its website of the alleged cannibal-killer Luka Magnotta holding a bottle of Blue, it probably thought that was the size of the issue: that bottle, that photo, that website. The photograph, Labatt reasoned, was harmful to the Blue “brand,” that bundle of emotions and associations with which corporations seek to surround their product. Therefore it must be made to disappear.

Perhaps it is too much to expect it to have considered the impact on press freedom if large corporations were able to dictate a news organization’s choice of material, photographic or otherwise. But you’d think it would at least have given some thought to how it would look. Alas that seems to have occurred to Labatt only after Twitter had got hold of the story, and subjected the company to several hours of online ridicule, after which it announced it would no longer pursue the matter. (I should confess here to having helped to kick things off on Twitter, but if I hadn’t someone else would. All it took was a hashtag and a couple of tweets.)

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Nevertheless, Labatt also attracted some sympathetic commentary amid the din. Perhaps the company had been heavy-handed in its approach to the Gazette. But you could hardly fault it for wanting to protect its brand, could you? Writing in the Ottawa Citizen, Dan Gardner observed: “Labatt had good reason to worry. It still does.”

In endorsing Labatt’s concern for its brand, we are implicitly accepting the essentially totalitarian assumptions that inform most advertising

What Gardner meant was that the association of your brand with a negative, horrifying image or idea, say an alleged cannibal-killer, can hurt sales, in the same way as positive, uplifting images can help sales. Magnotta’s “endorsement” of Blue would, on this view, have much the same impact as most celebrity endorsements, only in reverse.

There’s nothing rational about it either way, of course. The idea that Magnotta’s alleged crimes would somehow have been related to his fondness for drinking Blue is only slightly more tenuous than the idea that drinking Blue would cause hundreds of sexy girls to show up at your parties. The difference is that advertisers have invested heavily in encouraging one form of irrational association and not the other.

Well, all right, that’s what advertisers do. I’m just not sure why the rest of us should do the same. In endorsing Labatt’s concern for its brand, we are implicitly accepting the essentially totalitarian assumptions that inform most advertising, and its close cousin, politics: in the world inhabited by this brand or that party, nothing bad ever happens, nothing ever goes wrong, no one ever is unhappy. In such a world it is impossible that there could be any negative associations. Therefore, they must be made to disappear.

If advertisers have “good reason” to fear the harmful effects of negative associations — even a single photo on a website — it is the consequence of the hothouse climate of universally positive associations in which they seek to envelop their brand. The lunatic notion that people would be turned off drinking Blue by the sight of a bottle of Blue in an alleged killer’s hand only appears rational if you accept the equally lunatic idea that we live in a world where such people do not exist, or at least do not drink beer.

AP Photo/Video

Such a world was more easily created and maintained in the heyday of the mass media, where the means of communication were relatively few and the distribution of images and ideas was more easily controlled or at least monitored. It cannot long survive an encounter with social media. The more avenues there are for individuals to communicate, not just with each other but with everyone, the more opportunities there are to burst the totalitarian bubble, whether these are the creation of repressive dictatorships or beer companies.

Here and there you come across a company that has grasped how fundamentally their world has changed. On certain online retail sites, for example — Brooks Brothers is one — you will find, beneath each product listed for sale, a space for customers to add their comments. Often these are full of praise; but some are quite critical, even vitriolically so. It is impossible to read these, even today, without a feeling of shock. That a company would allow anyone to suggest — that it would provide the medium for them to suggest — that its products were less than perfect? This simply would not have been imaginable until recently.

And yet what is the effect? Does the presence of dissenting voices make the company’s claims for its products less credible, or more? Does it hurt the company’s brand, or help it? Suppose an airline were to run advertisements listing the flights that arrived late yesterday — and what it was doing to improve on this performance. Would that impress you more or less than ads that boasted of its general infallibility?

Or take my own industry, the continuing slow-motion train-wreck known as the newspaper business. Goodness knows we get a lot of things wrong. But, perhaps by accident, we got one thing wonderfully right. Somewhere back at the beginning it was decided to give space every day for letters to the editor. Every day, that is, we publish letters pointing out how mistaken we were about this fact or other, how harmful our ideas would be if anyone were fool enough to put them into practice, how irresponsible we are to publish that Coyne idiot.

Harmful to the brand? Hardly. Reality — including a willingness to admit our own errors — is our brand. Postmedia NewsTwitter: @acoyne

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